struggling with German

I am doing pretty well but really struggling with the "das" "der" and "die". the vocabulary is not hard to grasp really but the various tenses.... trinkt, trinke, etc are getting tough. Can anyone explain these to me a little better? I don't have any friends on here so I am a lone ranger here, definitely could use some help. thanks

March 11, 2019

32 Comments

The endings for those are fairly simple, if you look at it a certain way.

For I, the verb is always going to end in "e". Ex: danke, trinke gehe, etc.
He, She is always going to end in "t". Ex: dankt, trinkt, geht, etc.
You is (mostly) always going to end in "st" Ex: dankst, trinkst, gehst, etc.
They/we is always going to end in "en". Ex: danken, trinken, gehen, etc.

I am drinking. Ich trinke.
She is drinking. Sie trinkt.
They are drinking. Sie trinken.
You are drinking. Du trinkst.

: )

I am not too sure that du form will be used mostly for „you“. There are plenty of places where it is appropriate to show respect to people you don’t know and should defer to the native speaker on if they would like to use Sie or du.

Hi. Regarding the gender of words, when I started out in German, whenever I learned a new noun, I would write down the gender. You can keep a list. There are rules for gender. For example,words ending in -ung are usually feminine. For some nouns it is more tricky. Best to learn as you go.

As to verb tenses, regular verbs like trinken follow a set pattern. The ending is always the same for each person. You do need to learn the endings for different persons. Ist person ich trinke, second person du trinkst and so on. Writing down works for me.

I did German in Duolingo as a refresher. I finished the course. I have never checked any grammar notes. Not sure how Duo teaches the grammar. When I refresh a language I just work from memory and correct mistakes as I go along.

But if you go through all the lessons, you should memorise it eventually. I would not advise on skipping levels if you are a beginner. This a very complex language. In my experience it takes a while to learn this language. The grammar rules are complex. Look up different sources, not just Duo. As to the Gender learning, you can use online dictionaries.

There are lots of information on different languages on Pinterest for example., including German. I have an account and have loads on German grammar. There also loads of German apps.

der, die, das. You just have to memorize them with new words. When you learn a new noun you should learn „cat = die Katze“ „water = das Wasser“ „market = der Markt“. You will eventually catch patterns and rules that will make it easier to remember (all words that end in -ung take die and all words that end in -chen take das) but that isn’t important to start. To start, just the recognition that for the largest percentage of words, it just takes old fashioned work.

the verbs you have, are only a single tense - present. They are simply the conjugations of that single verb. English does it as well, but it is extremely simplified. (If you added thou and thee back into our table, it looks almost exactly like German). Most verbs take the following conjugation with some irregular verbs, sein, mögen, wissen, nehmen, all the Modal Verbs. But you just have to memorize them. And memorize the verbs that take vowel changes. Simplest way is to take the verb, drop the -en ending (sometimes just -n like in wandern) and follow the chart below.

I have made four livestream videos where I go through Duolingo German sentences and explain the grammar behind them. Starting with the second one, I prepared a short lesson on the very kinds of things you're asking about here. Then I work through some Duolingo sentences and then refer back to the grammar lesson that I just did.

Last week and the week before was about conjugation (trinke, trinkt... etc). Today's was on prepositions. I was thinking that today's stream was going to be the last for a while, but if people watch the replays of the last four and give feedback on what they'd like to see more of, I'll be glad to do more.

a tip: foreign words and words ending with -chen or -lein are usually das, words that end with -ung, -heit, -keit, -schaft are usually die. I would recommend keeping a notebook where you write down vocabulary and use a color scheme to remember the gender of each word.

I believe everyone that is new to learning German struggles with the definite articles and verb conjugation. The best tip I can give is, when you learn a new noun memorize the gender of the noun as well.

As far as verb conjugation, that will eventually click the more you practice. There are some irregular verbs, but for the most part, verbs follow the same patterns.

Be sure to check out the many German Language learning videos available on YouTube. My favorites are, "Learn German with Anja" and "Easy German".

First I would suggest thinking about the words in terms of masculine, feminine and neuter, instead of der, die, das. It may seem like semantics now, but I found it helpful to think that way especially as most indo-european languages have gender.

There are some patterns you will pick up on, though it's not going to follow every time. One example is conceptual words will mostly be feminine like die Gelegenheit, die Meinung, die Idee - and the endings of the first two examples I gave will always be feminine, so you will start to recognize them after awhile. In other cases you just have to learn them by rote. I also agree that it's important to learn the words with their definite article, Die Sonne instead of Sonne. Good luck!

The thing to note when studying multiple languages is that even though many languages have genders, nouns do not necessarily have the same gender. For example: in German, the sun is die Sonne (feminine) and the moon is der Mond (masculine); while in French, it is le soleil (masculine) and la lune (feminine).

No, not a typo, just what happens when someone stops using a foreign language on a regular basis and 25 years pass. Believe it or not, I used to be quasi-fluent in German (conversationally). I'm using Duo Lingo to brush up on German and Portuguese, also Spanish to some extent since I learned it informally, the rest of the languages are more or less new attempts :)

It's a little disheartening when I see how much knowledge and language competency I've lost but in German in particular I have no reason to speak it and though I like the German language, I learned it before I discovered the best reason and also aid to learning a foreign language is listening to music sung in that language.

Hence, Portuguese:the best music that everyone knows about, and Hungarian: the best music that nobody knows about. Also Welsh: the best music that nobody knows about and is also very difficult to locate.

I strongly recommend a book on German grammar. Even a basic one will develop your understanding of why different words behave in different ways, and all of a sudden you have a great deal more context to work with when reading German.